


Even If Things Get Heavy

by ghostnebula (gghostnebula)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dark Losers Club, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Everything in this is unhealthy, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Murder, Patrick Hockstetter is His Own Warning, Patrick Hockstetter's Fridge, Revenge, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Self-Harm, The Losers all love Eddie so much, Torture, Underage Drinking, Underage Smoking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, i kept it pretty subtle i think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:35:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26240494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gghostnebula/pseuds/ghostnebula
Summary: Patrick Hockstetter has wronged them, wronged themdeeply,and he needs to be put in his place. They’re going to go to that dark place just to finish whatItshould have finished a long time ago.He was not meant to survive the summer of 1989 any more than George Denbrough was meant to return home from his jaunt in the rain, limbs intact, paper boat in hand, the previous October.Things werepredetermined.Things needed to follow aplanto work out in the end. One hiccup, and the dominoes would start falling all wrong.And fall they did, didn’t they?-My quote: "The-The-Three on a muh-muh-hatch," [Bill] said. "B-Bad luh-luh-luck."
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 20
Kudos: 44
Collections: Labor Day Book Quote Challenge (2020)





	Even If Things Get Heavy

**Author's Note:**

> I really DO mean Dead Dove: Do Not Eat. This one is fucked RIGHT up. 
> 
> Biggest warnings are for character death, torture, and murder, as well as for implied non-con (not in the fic warnings, because it isn't explicit, but it's in the tags!)
> 
> Of course, a huge shout-out to [bimmyshrug](https://bimmyshrug.tumblr.com/) and [richieblows](https://richieblows.tumblr.com/) for putting this challenge together for us! It was really fun to participate! <3
> 
> Title is from [Float On](https://open.spotify.com/track/2lwwrWVKdf3LR9lbbhnr6R?si=-uCUrlX4TtGYC1ZjZDi3fA) by Modest Mouse ;) Get it?
> 
> More specific warnings (spoilers):  
> -vomiting  
> -tooth removal? ("illegal dentist" according to some people)  
> -denailing  
> -uhhh lots of stabbing  
> -disembowelment  
> -eye trauma  
> -face stabbing  
> -flaying  
> -breaking of some bones  
> -I don't know the proper terms for most of these  
> -there's so much blood  
> -I'm so sorry  
> -oh also ear removal??  
> -Patrick does not have a good day  
> -I think that's all of them  
> -no wait also dick-stabbing (being stabbed IN the dick not WITH a dick)

* * *

“I need a smoke,” Richie sighs, planting his ass on an overturned crate (he can’t be bothered to right it, not in this moment, not when he’s got so much other stuff going through his head). “Bev, what have you got?”

“You can buy your _own_ cigarettes, you know. Instead of taking mine all the time,” she tells him even as she’s pulling a pack of Lucky Strikes from the rolled sleeve of her black blouse. There’s no real bite to it. Not like there should be. There’s no playful lilt, no half-smile, no glint in her eyes that gives away her game. It’s just an automatic response, and it falls flat and dies under the weight of their collective grief. She shakes a cigarette into his outstretched hand. “Anyone else?”

Tentatively, Bill and Ben raise their hands. Stan, in true fashion, wrinkles his nose at the notion.

It’s Mike who finally asks the question they’re all too afraid to give voice to, surveying the unfortunate remains of their little underground clubhouse, which has served them loyally for years and years now. “What are we going to do?”

“Fuck if I know,” Bev says, striking a match and holding it out to Richie to light his dart. But she _does_ know. They all do. Richie gets a feeling like he’d had back _then,_ a feeling like he can see into all their heads, can tell they’ve all got the same dangerous idea kicking around in there. It shows in Mike’s eyes and the frown tugging at Stan’s lips and ashen pallor of Ben’s skin. 

They all know what needs to be done.

Beverly lights Bill’s cigarette, too, but he takes the match from her before she can light Ben’s. “Hey!” she snaps as he shakes it out, already puffing up like she’s gonna give him an earful (a regular occurrence with this crowd).

“The-The-Three on a muh-muh-hatch,” Bill explains with a semi-apologetic grimace, tongue fumbling over every syllable. “B-Bad luh-luh-luck.” Bev huffs and lights a second match for herself and Ben.

Richie doesn’t have the sense (or the energy, if he’s being honest) to stop himself from kicking out at Bill’s over-polished shoe and asking, “What do you need _luck_ for, mushmouth?” with extra emphasis on the nasty nickname. Big Bill’s stutter has, after all, pretty well disappeared since their showdown with the damned clown when they were still just kids; now it’s only ever pronounced when he’s upset or nervous. Richie knows damn well what he’s got to be upset _and_ nervous about, but he’s struggling with it just as much as any of them, and his best line of defense is to Get Off A Good One. Or at least to make an attempt. Normally Bill and him would have a good chuck about Richie’s name-calling, and if there were any _real_ grown-ups around (not just a ragtag group of eighteen-year-olds afraid of the life ahead of them) they’d be as appalled as the Losers would be amused.

Besides: Richie knows precisely what they need luck for. He’s just afraid of it. Or, afraid of how much he’s _anticipating_ it. 

“Don’t buh-be a suh-suh-smartass.” Bill’s face goes sour, but the pain beneath is unmistakable. 

_“Smart_ ass?” says Stan incredulously, “There’s nothing _smart_ about him, Bill. He’s _just_ an ass.”

Richie’s heart isn’t _in_ it like usual when he catches Stan’s eyes and feigns being mortally wounded. “Stan, _Stan,_ how _could_ you be so cruel? This is why Eddie is--”

But he cuts himself off and a _hurt_ ripples through the eerily quiet clubhouse. Even with the sunlight streaming in through the open door and window, and the birds singing somewhere outside, there’s an ominous air to the whole place. Like it _knows_ it’s been ravaged, it’s been _defiled,_ and is full of despair over its own fate. 

Eddie would tell him to quit it. Eddie would call him a _dumb_ ass, or something a little more feisty, like _shithead_ or _numbnuts._ They’d share a secret little smile and then Eddie would laugh, and Richie would laugh, and his heart would beat a million times a second just being near him, like it always does. That’s how it _should_ go. They’d be crammed into a hammock that’s no longer big enough for _one_ of them, let alone both at once, but they’d find a way, and Eddie would get a pinched and worried look on his face every time the beams creaked, like he expected the whole thing to come crashing down under their weight, and Richie would tease him about being a scaredy-cat and pinch his cheeks until he was red and scowling, worries forgotten. 

Except there’s not even a hammock _left_ for that, just a torn pile of fabric dangling from one pillar in the corner, and there’s no _Eddie_ to-- 

“We can’t just _do_ something like that,” Ben says, hesitant, from where he’s still standing by the foot of the ladder, picking up the conversation where it left off -- picking up that unspoken condemnation they’re all contemplating and hurling it back into the fray. No one has to ask what he’s talking about. The mention of Eddie’s name brought a hardness to Bill’s eyes that Richie hasn’t seen since the summer of 1989. 

He’s _pissed._ He’s going to want to exact revenge, however revenge may be exacted, and they’re all going to go along with it no matter how crazy it seems, because Bill has always had that kind of power over them. It worked out alright, the first time, so Richie dares to hope this time they’ll be okay in the end.

_Some_ of them will be okay, in the end. 

There’s a burning behind his eyes and in an instant he’s got his glasses shoved up to his forehead so he can wipe the tears before they fall. The cigarette is burning away where it’s now clamped between his teeth and he grabs for it with shaking fingers, greedily sucking down a lungful of smoke as if that’ll do something to calm him. 

It doesn’t help anywhere near as much as he’d hoped. 

Bev doesn’t say anything -- what’s left to say, really? -- as she kneels beside him and drapes an arm across his shoulders. Stan is quick to join her, wrapping himself around Richie’s other side, and then Bill, Mike, and Ben converge all at once, and Richie sobs into his hands until his throat burns and his head pounds and the cigarette has nearly burned itself out. No amount of nicotine is going to help him out of this one, he figures, but he’s going to keep at it anyway until he feels less like he’s actively dying. 

The terrible sound of his grief produces a muffled echo from the wooden walls, padded with too many memories; sullied by the worst of them. As if the clubhouse weeps with him. 

In some sense, it’s equally bereft.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to calm down, exactly, but he knows for sure a couple other Losers are crying right alongside him. Some of them have run out of tears by now, or have just gone altogether numb to the situation, in ways Richie wishes he could emulate. Once his breathing is slower -- not back to normal, just not bordering on hyperventilation -- he’s the first to speak. “We should probably clean up,” he suggests, already looking to Bill, whose eyes are glazed as he stares into the corner where--

“Yeah,” Bill agrees too quietly, as if speaking from a place much farther away than any of the rest of them, and Mike has to put a hand on his cheek and turn his head back towards them to get him to focus. Bill blinks a few times once Mike calls his name, and Richie can see the telltale redness blossoming around his eyes. He’s trying not to cry. “I-I just… the buh...buh... _blood.”_ His fingers twist into the fabric of Mike’s suit jacket, eyes shining now, and Mike relinquishes his grip on Richie altogether to pull Bill into a hug, curling bodily around him.

Realistically, Bill is probably the one struggling the most with this, even if some selfish part of Richie’s brain wants to pretend _he_ “deserves” to be the most broken up about it: as if it’s a fucking _competition._ Bill has as much right to be fucking… fucking _heartbroken_ as any of the rest of them, if not _more,_ because he’s the one who _found--_

A nausea Richie’s becoming increasingly familiar with washes over him and he has to squeeze his eyes shut and count a few slow breaths before it passes. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s puked since that day. He’s got a sensitive stomach, to go with his overall sensitivity “as a person,” or so his mom has told him a million times throughout his life. 

Frankly, if _this_ is what “being a sensitive soul” is all about, he’ll take a one-way ticket to being an emotionless fucking lump for the rest of his life. 

The relative silence is broken by Ben grabbing the toppled bookshelf and heaving, lifting it against the wall as the few books and trinkets it was still clinging to crash to the floor. A cloud of dust from the dry dirt floor swells up into the air around his feet and dissipates, leaving the dim air hazier than before. 

_(Eddie would say something about his asthma, or about lung infections; about breathing in dust or dirt, and how Richie and Bev were most at risk because they keep smoking even though he tells them_ not _to, and they’re “compromising” their lungs, and--)_ Richie rushes up the ladder to puke, anyway.

No one mentions it, just the same as they’ve chosen not to further acknowledge the _other_ elephant in the room, but the clubhouse smells like death. Not the sewer-shit-stink way they’re familiar with, but there’s something cold and mildly pungent in the air. The blood’s been soaking into that corner for a few days, Richie supposes, and the thought comes along with something akin to nonchalance. It’s been carefully dissected from its origin. There’s no correlation between Eddie and the blood -- it’s just _the blood._

_That blood there,_ it’s had a couple days to sink deep into the dirt floor and the wooden panels on the walls, the summer heat trapped in the clubhouse making a _stench_ bubble up out of it. Caustic. Cold in its familiarity _and_ in its lack thereof. 

Just _death._ Nothing more. There’s no face attached to it, because Richie can’t stand to attach a face to it. He’ll break right apart and die, slow and painful (just like the person that blood came from) right here where he stands, if he allows himself to consider the connections. 

Maybe if he pinches himself hard enough he’ll wake up.

Maybe -- and he lets out a deranged laugh that has a few heads turning towards him as he thinks this -- just _maybe_ he’ll blink and he’ll be thirteen years old, screaming his fool head off down in the sewers, being chased by a clown hell-bent on killing and fucking _eating_ him. He’ll wake up and he’ll have just hallucinated the entire last five years of his life, and he thinks he might kiss Eddie right then and there if he opens his eyes and finds himself _there,_ with him. 

Why didn’t he ever do it _before?_

_(Because he’s a coward, that’s why)_

_(Because he always thought he’d have more time)_

Richie untethers the unfortunate remains of their hammock from the screw eye in the pillar it’s hanging from. There’s blood spattered on this, too, dried and crusted, and Richie has to consciously fight down the ghastly mental image his stupid fucking brain tries to conjure up, because he doesn’t _want_ to know the details. He doesn’t fucking _need_ to know exactly what happened because

_(it’ll kill him)_

it’s _done,_ it _happened,_ and they’re never going to be able to undo it, and they’ll have to live with that for the rest of their lives.

_(Richie can still hear the godawful sound of Sonia Kaspbrak’s wailing)_

There’s this childish idea shimmying and shaking through his head, dodging his accusations of its _stupidity,_ that if they can just put everything here, in their underground clubhouse, back to normal, then all other aspects of their lives presently in disarray will slide back into place. _Click-click-click._ Easy as that. They can go back to normal if they just fix _this._

“We can’t keep this,” he announces to the group at large. “It’s dirty.”

_How the fuck is he ever going to_ dispose _of it? How the fuck is he ever going to have the strength to part ways with this… this tattered and filthy piece of fabric?_

“We…” he swallows down the tears that threaten to make an appearance, for a second time since their arrival. “We have to get a new one.”

“We’ll get a new one,” Stan assures, no sarcastic jibe or dry witticism this time. His hand rests on Richie’s elbow, a gentle, comforting pressure. “Okay? We’ll get a new one as soon as we can.”

“Bev,” he gasps around a stuttering breath. “Bev, I just need-- can I have--?” She lights him another cigarette and he cries all the same when it burns in his lungs. 

Richie doesn’t get much else done after that.

  
  
  


He knows, in some part of him, that what he's feeling isn't any part of human nature. What he's _thinking_ \-- what they're _all_ thinking -- isn't any more natural than the _thing_ that haunts Derry. It's ravenous and _foul_ and blackening, and it’s fuelled by a thick and terrible hatred (or maybe that's just grief, festered and bursting with puss, rotting inside him until it's altogether recognizable). 

No, what they crave is no more a part of their nature than shape-shifting monsters should be in the nature of this forsaken town they live in.

_(It fills all the hollow places)_

Richie Tozier is hollow, alright. He's hollow as they come. He's been scraped clean out like a regular old jack-o-lantern in the days leading up to

*

“ _Halloween! C’mon, Stan, live a little!”_

_“It_ stinks, _Richie.”_

_“Who doesn’t like the smell of_ pumpkin?” _Bev asked, shaking her head, already buried up to the elbow in the pumpkin she and Eddie cut the top off of. Eddie was, as usual, refusing to stick his hands in pumpkin guts, citing allergies Richie knew were made up, and bitching about the texture, and_ maybe _eyeing the thing almost longingly -- if his mom smelled that on him when he got home, he’d be up to his ears in_ shit. 

_Well, he could just take a shower here, anyway, was Richie’s reasoning as he ripped out a handful of goo from inside his and Stan’s pumpkin and splatted it right on the top of Eddie’s head. Eddie’s eyes bugged out, his face going pale and then flaring red all in a breath. “Richie, what the fuck?” he demanded in a rush, snatching a handful of stringy guts from his and Beverly’s own shared pumpkin (Bev had affectionately dubbed it Jack, and promised to stab him gently in such a sweet voice it had almost made Richie shudder instead of laugh). He slapped the whole handful right into Richie’s laughing face._

_“You’re going to ruin the walls if you two keep that up.” Richie lobbed a clump of guts at Stan, too, and it hit home with a wet_ thuk. “This _is why Bill is my_ real _best friend,” Stan added after a moment’s pause, during which time Eddie began picking cold, slimy pumpkin out of his hair. The teasing was commonplace between Richie and Stan, who had pretty well known each other from birth -- their mothers attended the same synagogue, being that it was the only one near Derry, and their pregnancies had overlapped. The connection hadn’t died after Richie was born, so he and Stan had shared everything from cradles to favourite toys to chicken pox._

_No one would ever_ truly _replace Stan as Richie’s best friend, nor Richie as Stan’s, but they’d managed to find more people along the way that they loved just as much, in different ways, and liked to poke fun about it._

_“That’s what I’ve got my Eds for,” Richie teased, looping an arm around Eddie’s neck to drag him into a noogie, effectively smearing the goo right into his scalp._

_“Richie, I’m gonna fucking_ kick _you,” Eddie screeched, beating at his arms as he bucked, trying to escape. The smile betrayed his real intentions, and the moment Richie relinquished his grip he was bracing for another glob of pumpkin guts to the face._

_“Guys, Mrs. Tozier is guh-gonna be pissed if we--”_

_Eddie hit Bill square in the chest with the innards from Ben’s pumpkin. Ben had made the choice to carve his own, since he had the most chance of winning if no one else interfered with his work. He was right, of course, and the rest of the Losers had already accepted their fate of not winning any pumpkin-carving contests or the whole twenty dollar accompanying prize anytime soon._

_They managed to drag Ben into it regardless_ (Bev _managed, at least, which came as a surprise to no one), and Mike was pelted with pumpkin guts even after putting his hands up in surrender, prompting Ben to begin explaining the definitions of war crimes to the rest of the group, and they_ did _ruin the wall with several large orange stains that Richie was forced to save up money to buy new paint for. That didn’t matter. Eddie’s hand in his, now_ that _mattered. That mattered a whole hell of a lot. Eddie’s fingers slipped between his, the sensation of_ goop _squishing between their fingers simultaneously horrible and hilarious, and Richie’s eyes went wide between his dirty glasses._

_Eddie was laughing, liberated and_ loud, _as he grabbed Richie by the hand to drag him in front of him as a human shield, but then he just… didn’t let go, even when Bev hollered something about cheating and landed a perfectly-aimed hit to Eddie’s partially-exposed arm._

_“Not my Spaghetti!” Richie cried, snapping out of the daze Eddie put him in to spin around and shield him properly. Bill, being Bill, threw a fistful of guts right at Richie’s ass, and laughed so loud about it Richie was pretty sure the neighbours’ dog started barking. Privately, just to Eddie, as he hunched over him and crowded him against the wall, Richie said, “Sorry. You can use my shower.”_

_“I know,” Eddie said, beaming, as it was a given. Richie often found himself bailing Eddie out of situations that would otherwise result in him being grounded or dragged to the emergency room or whatever other punishment his mother could think up. Letting Eddie shower away mud or blood or sewer water in the safety of his home had become almost a ritual for them. It was the only way Eddie ever got a chance to have_ real _fun, not the walking-on-eggshells kind Sonia Kaspbrak expected him to have._

_And then Eddie’s free hand reached up, and he crammed a freezing fucking cold wad of seeds and guts right down the front of Richie’s shirt, and Richie could have kissed him in that moment, if he was a little more brave._

_He waited -- waited for the right moment. For a_ better _moment, in a better place. Eddie would always have him, after all, and he’d always have Eddie, so why rush? Eddie would be there when he was ready, just as Eddie was always there when he needed him most. If ever Richie was_

*

feeling particularly low, Eddie’s house is the place to go. At night, they’re safe, because Sonia Kaspbrak sleeps like the dead, and while she’s awake, they can enjoy the privacy of that little raftered room above the garage.

It occurs to him, brief and almost irrelevant, that he’s still halfway to being moved in there -- stacks of his comics, sweaters left behind (not necessarily by accident), candy and snacks he bought and snuck in there for them to share. Eddie brought him up a blanket one winter when they were both complaining of the cold, and it’s remained there ever since, collecting dust. They just end up sharing Eddie’s blanket, anyway, something his aunt in Haven knitted him, striped purple-and-white. Richie’s always preferred it that way, and Eddie never complained, never pointed out that Richie had his _own_ knitted blanket, picked special for him all those years ago, folded up in the corner. 

There are tapes, stacks of them, and an old Walkman he keeps there for them to listen to music. Old toys they haven’t even touched in _years,_ relics of a childhood long dead, lined up on the bookshelf, shoved against the wall, stacked by the hatch (waiting to be knocked over on someone’s head, or so Eddie would always say, with a little eye-roll, arms folded, a smile teasing at his lips).

Richie feels a tear cut down his cheek, followed by another. He wipes them away roughly with the heel of his hand. He’s already cried _enough,_ damn it.

_(has he, though? will it ever be enough?)_

It’s too early to sleep, but he doesn’t feel like doing much else right now. His body is heavy with grief, or with something else; he doesn’t quite know anymore. Whatever he’s feeling, all sharp and jumbled up inside him -- like he’ll never be able to properly distinguish _any_ of it -- it’s just _bad._

Everything has gone fucking tits-up and he’s barely holding on for the ride, but he still knows exactly where the fuck it’s _going,_ and _that,_ more than anything, compresses all that _shit_ he can’t bear to deal with down into one focal point: anger.

Maybe, more accurately, bloodlust. A desire for _revenge._ And he knows those dark places inside himself -- has known them intimately since the tender age of thirteen, when he was forced to face them, to learn them, to _integrate_ with them for the sake of survival. He’s held back those urges for _years and years,_ and now he doesn’t _want_ to, just the same as none of the other Losers want to. 

So they won't. They won’t, anymore. Because Patrick Hockstetter has wronged them, wronged them _deeply,_ and he needs to be put in his place. They’re going to go to that dark place just to finish what _It_ should have finished a long time ago.

The last of the Bowers’ Gang, Its 

_(puppets)_

dogsbodies, left behind to enact more destruction in their absence.

Richie knows it isn’t right, what he wants right now

_(to sink his fingers into Hockstetter’s fucking eyes until they burst in a hot spray of blood, or put his limbs through a wood chipper, or split him open from the crotch up and pull out his organs one by one while he bleeds out, letting him_ feel _it,_ _letting him_ suffer _for what he did)_

but he can’t trick himself into believing it isn’t _normal._ Patrick hurt him worse than any physical wound. It’s the least he deserves. Wouldn’t anyone want revenge for something like this?

He slips his glasses off, drops them around where his nightstand is, and rolls onto his side, staring through the window at the blurred image of the sun

*

_sinking below the horizon. Dusk was hanging low over them, the stars blinking awake against the bruised sky. The summer air was sticky against Richie’s skin, but a cool breeze had kicked up in the west, and it rattled the corn stalks on their right as he and Eddie walked back from Mike’s together._

_It was quiet between them, a rare occurrence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, not by any means._

_Richie thought, as they walked along in companionable silence, him guiding his bike along down the road and Eddie fiddling with the strap of his knapsack, that there was_ something _about that moment. The cicadas were singing all around them, a screeching_ hum _that faded into background noise easily. Gravel crunched under their feet._

_And he thought, almost guiltily, that it could be romantic. The purpling sky, the constellations coming to life, the warmth of summer pressing in on them. The wind in Eddie’s hair, which was curling at the ends in the humidity._

_The fact that Richie was so desperately in love with him, he often thought it might kill him. Just looking at him then, it was like a helium balloon was swelling up in his chest, too big, leaving no room to breathe. He wondered what would happen when it burst._

_By the time they were slowing to a stop in front of Eddie’s house, he was sure it just might._

_“Thanks for walking me home,” Eddie said, smiling, face still red from laughing at some childish joke or another Richie made -- he wasn’t sure anymore, he was kind of in a daze, too twitterpated to function. He tucked a curl behind his ear, or at least tried to. It sprung right back up from under his fingers. “I know it’s a little out of your way.”_

_Richie snorted. “Hardly,” he said. He wanted so badly to kiss Eddie, then. “It’s five extra minutes, tops, Eds.” Just two blocks over and a bit up West Broadway, just out of range of all those pretentious rich assholes whose grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had run the town before any of them were even thought of. Just close enough to sneak over here whenever he wanted, and for Eddie to do the same, and for them to meet halfway when it was the kind of day they’d need to spend at the clubhouse, just to get away from everything else._

(kiss him kiss him you know you want to just do it **fuck it all just do it)**

_‘Besides, I’d go anywhere with you,’ he wanted to add, but he swallowed it down, because he was no fool. A boy like him was destined for an early grave, especially in a town like Derry. He wouldn’t drag Eddie into it, he wouldn’t dare endanger him like that, no matter how much he smiled until dimples stood out on his cheeks, or his dark eyes shone in the orange glow from the streetlights, or his nimble fingers twisted the strap of his bag to and fro; not a nervous gesture, just an old habit._

_Richie was terribly in love with all of his habits._

(just fucking kiss him you coward take the chance while you have it you dumb fucking--)

_In spite of that -- in spite of_ all _of it -- Richie was too afraid to do anything, so_

*

he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. How could he have known that it would be Eddie, not himself, that Derry would destroy first? If he’d known then that he’d lose him anyway, he would have taken advantage of _any_ time they could have together. But he didn’t.

He remembers. He remembers drawing him in closer, resisting that little pleading voice in his head that sounded too much like the real him, then asking himself what the point of resisting at all was if it would only ever hurt like this, as he hugged Eddie goodbye. Fought with all his might against the desire to just press the tiniest, subtlest of kisses to his forehead as he pulled back, just to _feel_ it, just to let out some of that love that was suffocating him. _“Goodnight, Spaghetti Man,”_ he’d said, and Eddie had swatted at his arm but he’d also bit back a giggle. _“Sleep tight. Don’t let the piranhas bite.”_

_“It’s_ bed bugs, _you dumbass,”_ Eddie had called after him, heavy in the impending nightfall, as Richie continued on his way down the street, headed home, where he’d only lie awake for hours and think about him, because he was a lovestruck fool (still is, circumstances notwithstanding).

_“Oh, Eds, you have bed bugs? Sorry to hear!”_ And he hadn’t needed to look to know Eddie was flipping him off even though he was laughing, trying to keep it quiet lest he disturb the neighbours, or worse, his mother.

Richie would _kill_ to go back there. To walk Eddie home in the twilight and dream about kissing him. To actually _act_ on it. To take a different route, keep him with him longer just because he could. Lie under the stars with him and explain in excruciating detail how much of his heart just _belonged_ to him and that he’d never be able to take it back, nor did he want it, regardless of what Eddie wanted to do with that. Take it or leave it

_(I’ll still be in love with you anyway)_

just don’t stop being my friend because of it.

That’s all he’d ask. Because he truly doesn’t know how to live without Eddie. Not because he’s rendered helpless, or he’s forgotten how to breathe (sure feels like it, though). But what kind of _living_ is it when someone’s torn a hole right through your chest, and every day becomes agony?

Richie’s known for his melodrama, but he’s sure this reaction is perfectly reasonable, considering. 

No one else is ever going to _understand_ him quite like that. Him and Eddie have been skipping stones and scraping elbows together since Richie was old enough to begin developing an _actual_ personality. They’ve been holding hands and crying on each other’s shoulders and sharing ice cream for as long as he can fucking remember. At this point, Eddie _is_ an integral part of his personality. He’s the _anticipated_ laugh at his worst jokes, the driving force behind his best work, his greatest source of comfort when he can’t imagine finding it anywhere else.

Gone, just like that. 

_Alone,_ in the clubhouse, _hurt_ and probably terrified out of his goddamn mind while Patrick Hockstetter did God-knows-what to him. 

Nausea rolls through him again, squeezing around his stomach, but he simply doesn’t have the strength to deal with it anymore. He’s not sure he ever will again. He had to attend Eddie Kaspbrak’s funeral today, after all, and where does that leave him? Bereft and hopeless, moored here with the other Losers for support, sure, but not the one person who would know how to make things seem better. 

“All peaches and cream today, right?” says Stan’s voice suddenly, making Richie jerk back, just as a dark shape blocks out the dying sunlight streaming through his window. He sits up and fumbles for his glasses.

“Stan, what the hell? What are you doing here?”

Stan’s weight hits the bed beside him and the mattress bounces, nearly throwing him to the floor. He finally gets hold of his glasses and crams them onto his face, poking himself in the eye as he does. Stan is fixing his window screen back into place with a stoic concentration only he seems capable of. Still, there’s an air about him, of harried concern, maybe, or the simple stress of dealing with the death of a close friend -- of having just returned from the _funeral_ of a close friend. “What do you mean ‘what am I doing here?’ Do you think I’m just gonna leave you alone like this?”

“Whuh--?” 

“I talked to the others and we all agreed I was probably the best person to send, since, you know, I’ve known since you were shitting your pants.”

Right. Yeah. Of course. He doesn’t want to be alone right now, anyway. He doesn’t think so, at least. “Touching,” is what he manages to say, a bite of sarcasm to it that has Stan looking less frazzled than a second ago. Keeping Richie from completely unravelling in the coming days (or maybe weeks, or perhaps months) sure is going to be one hell of a job, anyway, so he’s got the right look about him.

“Besides, Richie, we really need to talk about Hockstetter.”

  
  
  


Maybe Mandy Fazio will notice. Maybe he won’t. He’s getting up there in years now, or so Richie’s mom would say. In Richie’s _own_ words, he’s an old fart, and a senile one at that. Derry could use a new dump keeper, sure, but it’s in their best interest right now that the current dump keeper be too fried in the brain to notice anything out of the ordinary.

And even then: would _anyone_ notice? Would anyone care? How little care and attention had been given to Eddie’s death? No investigation, no questions for any of the Losers, not for anyone else who might have leads, not even a _charade_ of attempting to find whoever was responsible. Hell, the Derry police department still doesn’t even know the clubhouse exists, and Eddie was fucking _brutalized_ in it. They’d only done as much as stamping an unassuming little _“unknown”_ as a cause of death, and then shipped the body off to the funeral home and washed their hands of the whole affair.

For once in his life, Richie had been grateful for Sonia Kaspbrak’s overbearing protectiveness of her son, but even that had proven ineffective against how fucking dead-set on remaining apathetic Derry’s residents truly seem to be.

Beverly shows them. She’s afraid to, Richie can see it in her face, in the quickening of her breath, in her stilted movements as they approach it. She reminds them about the flying leeches, the sucking, biting monstrosities, and they all take a healthy step or two back from the fridge. She _doesn’t_ have to remind them of the message from It.

She yanks on the handle and goes stumbling back into them. Bill catches her. The refrigerator door swings open and there’s… nothing. No bloodstains on the door, no flying leeches, no clowns leaping out at them, no balloons.

Of course they knew, logically, they wouldn’t find anything supernatural. That’s behind them, as much as it _can_ be, but Patrick’s recent mental deterioration (if there was anything _left_ to deteriorate) has them all on edge. 

_What,_ they’ve all wondered, _could have been the catalyst for such action?_

Besides the fact that Patrick is certifiably fucking insane, and they’ve all known that for as long as they’ve known _him._

But why _now?_

“Is it big enough?” Mike asks, peering over Richie’s shoulder into the moldering fridge. Gnats buzz around their heads, but Richie pays them no mind, fixated on the task at hand, and on a near future that’s been conjured up in the less agreeable limits of his imagination. A future that’s beginning to appeal to him, which might have made him reel in a different life. 

“Should be,” Ben answers, as they’d anticipated. Patrick isn’t small by any means, but the refrigerator isn’t particularly small, either.

And anyway, Richie thinks with a rush, by the time they’re done with him, he’ll probably be a hell of a lot more flexible, if he’s still in once piece.

Bill is the one who says what Richie isn’t, when he’s too lost in his fantasy of exacting revenge. “Good.” There’s a low, growling quality to his voice. He’s probably got some of the same ideas as Richie. “Let’s get him, then.”

He leads them all up to the dump, following an overgrown path littered with an increasing amount of refuse the closer they get to the dump itself. _‘Dumpoids,’_ Bev calls them; the sprawling evidence of the central point in which all of Derry’s waste has accumulated. The _spread_ of it, creeping out from its intended final resting place to tarnish the surrounding woods. Richie kicks a crushed pop can along the trail for a while, almost trips on a TV with a blown-out screen, and spots the fucking jackpot peeking out from a tangle of bushes as they near the edge of the dump proper. He veers off course and crashes through the overgrown weeds, ignoring Stan calling after him. 

There, swathed in greenery, is a wicker chair in semi-admissible condition. Some of the top edge is rotting away, but the legs still seem sturdy enough, and the arm rests are thick and durable. The white paint has peeled away in most places, leaving the blackening-brown wood beneath exposed. The damp hasn’t rotted it through yet as it does with most things out here. 

Behind him, the others are following him up the incline towards this dump escapee

_(“dumpoid”)_

He can hear their approach as much as he can feel it, and he’s just grabbing the arms of the chair and ripping it free of the bindweed and thistle that has it in a deathgrip when Bill comes to a stop beside him. He nearly gets a faceful of wicker for his trouble.

“I’ll be damned,” Bev says, a few feet behind him.

“You think that’s always been there, or you think something put it there just in time for uh-uh- _us_ to find it?”

“I think it’s a chair and it’ll keep him in one place long enough for me to dissect him,” Richie bites out, and Bill _smiles_ at him, honest-to-god smiles, and he finds he can’t help but to smile right back, even if there’s a fucking _hole_ where his ability to feel genuine happiness used to reside. It’s a malicious sort of thing. Something that would give Henry Bowers himself pause, if he weren’t busy being locked up in Juniper Hill.

Bill peels a thread of stinging thistle off the leg of the chair, taking a fair amount of paint with it. “That’s good enough for me.”

It falls to Mike and Ben to “collect” their old pal Patrick, while the rest of them set up something of a play area for themselves back behind the junked cars and endless piles of unwanted furniture, abandoned toys, and broken electronics. Richie waves Mike and Ben off, the two of them following Bill’s instruction to head for the baseball diamond behind the Tracker Brothers’, despite him having no way of knowing where Patrick could even be right now.

“We were just gonna wait by his house,” Mike says, scratching the back of his neck. “If he wasn’t home, y’know. Figured we could catch him on the way in.”

Bill shakes his head and insists the empty lot back there was the way to go, and shoos them off, just like that, armed with a steel baseball bat and an unhealthy anger over the death of a friend. 

Richie stands there a while, listening to cicadas trill in the dying light around them. The contents of his backpack feel unbearably heavy, not for the purpose they will serve, but for the _reason_ they’re there in the first place. A sigh shudders up out of him, an exhalation of the foul air surrounding all of Derry’s undesired _things._

This is not how it was meant to be. He can understand this, not from the perspective of a heartbroken boy, but from that of a universal _being_ that can’t bear to lose control. 

This was not the _plan._

Something was to be done about It, whether five years ago or twenty-seven-or-so years from _then,_ and all the pieces had been painstakingly arranged to make it so. The Losers, pawns in a game, had risked it all for some nameless,

_(Maturin)_

faceless,

_(the Turtle)_

being that needed child soldiers to do its bidding. 

And in return, arrangements had been made regarding their continued survival -- the removal of all _other_ threats, all the smaller, more human anomalies that posed a danger to their lives and well-being. 

Two had slipped through the cracks, one more obvious to them than the other, and here Richie is, desperately alone in the presence of friends, if not for the _thing,_ the commander of their fates

_(the fucking_ Turtle)

and its one small oversight.

Patrick Hockstetter was not meant to survive the summer of 1989 any more than George Denbrough was meant to return home from his jaunt in the rain, limbs intact, paper boat in hand, the previous October.

Things were _predetermined._ Things needed to follow a _plan_ to work out in the end. One hiccup, and the dominoes would start falling all wrong.

And fall they did, didn’t they?

He fumbles a pack of Camels from the side pocket of his bag and produces a match, lighting up a dart and taking in an acidic lungful of tobacco-and-tar smoke. His eyes water. 

Why couldn’t their damn “friend” up in the sky, or wherever the fuck it is, protect Eddie where they had failed?

He can hear Bill calling him to come over and join them, something about needing the bag, but he doesn’t move just yet. They’ve got time. They’ve got plenty of time before Mike and Ben come back to them, dragging Patrick Hockstetter’s limp form between them. They’ve got _time_ before they finally make murderers of themselves. Sadists on par with Hockstetter himself, or Bowers, or any other dogsbody that let It possess their feeble minds and puppeteer them through acts of unthinkable cruelty. 

Stan’s convinced -- convinced enough to initiate a blood pact -- that they couldn’t kill It. That in twenty-five or twenty-eight or thirty years, they’ll have to go back into the heart of Derry and finish what they started. 

Richie believes him more every day. 

_Does It ever truly sleep, or is Its hold on the town an endless one, choking the light and life and joy out of all things that come too close?_

Somewhere much deeper, in a place in his mind he doesn’t dare look too closely at thoughts from, he wonders this: _How far under Its influence are they really? How many of the decisions made this week have been their own?_

He works the butt of the cig between his teeth and realizes it’s somehow only hurting him _more_ to try to calm his nerves with nicotine, because all it ever does is make him _expectant._ Any second now, a voice will pipe up beside him reminding him of the dangers of cigarettes, the toxins they’re loaded up with, the many and varied cancers they can cause. Deft fingers will pluck it from between his lips and a worn red runner will stomp it out, and Eddie will pout up at him with his eyebrows slanted, doleful eyes bright, and tell him how it doesn’t

*

_“make you cool, you know. You’re going to rot your gums, Richie. Do you ever even listen when I tell you these things?” Eddie’s foot tapped impatiently on the pavement, his hands planted on his hips._

_“I always listen, Eds.” Richie shot him a wink and puffed smoke out of his nostrils in a slow stream. “I just have an addiction. You know how it is.”_

_“I don’t, actually.”_

_“Really?” Richie snuck another look at him out of the corner of his eye as he turned his face back towards the sky. The sun beating down on them was making him overhot and exhausted, but it was nothing a good lemonade from one of the stands nearby and a good cigarette or two couldn’t fix. Eddie had slathered sunblock all over every bit of exposed skin on each Loser that morning, anyway, and he’d been all but forcing water down their throats since they first entered Bassey Park by sneaking up around the back of Derry High and across the Kissing Bridge to get into the Canal Days Festival without any admission fees. He wasn’t terribly worried about his well-being in the summer heat, not with Eddie aggressively mothering them at every turn._

_He knew if he pointed it out, Eddie would apologize and withdraw, and later that night he’d call, or otherwise show up outside Richie’s house, to insist he was nothing like his mother, he_ wasn’t; _he didn’t_ want _to be like her._

_And truly, he wasn’t, because it didn’t take a genius to see Eddie’s care-taking came from a place of love, not possessiveness._

_So Richie allowed himself one more draw from the cigarette before he dropped it to the ground and put it out himself, just barely beating Eddie to it. “You ever gonna stop sucking on that aspirator, then?”_

_Eddie’s hand went to the fanny pack secured around his waist, eyebrows knitting somehow more tightly together than before. He’d explained to them all about placebos the way Norbert Keene had explained them, a few days after their expedition into the sewers for their fated showdown, and still he hadn’t been able to part with the damned thing, too reliant on it after a lifetime of believing too firmly in his own afflictions._

Old habits die hard, _Richie supposed._

_He doesn’t answer the question, just swings back around to reprimanding Richie. “Those things will give you cancer.”_

_“So I’ve been told.”_

_“My dad died of cancer.”_

_That, at least, gave Richie pause. Eddie didn’t speak of his late father often, if at all, and his eyes always brimmed with a longing grief when the topic came up._

_“I know,” was all Richie could think to say, and he’d tossed the rest of the pack into the Canal on their way back across the bridge that night, headed home under the cover of the stars, rides going dark in the quiet fairgrounds behind them._

_Richie thought to invite him over. Maybe invite them all over, pull an all-nighter, raid his parents’ liquor cabinet or try some of that dope he bought from Jonesy under the bleachers at school. Play card games_

*

to pass the time.

Patrick’s somewhere between unconsciousness and awareness by the time Mike and Ben get him to the dump. He lost both shoes and one sock somewhere along the way, and the cuffs of his pants are torn and muddy. A dribble of blood traces a path from his ear down the side of his neck, spotting on the dirty collar of his shirt. It’s beginning to dry and flake already. 

“He was cutting up rats behind a dumpster,” Ben tells them, looking a little green as they drop him into the chair. Their game of Old Maid has been abandoned in the dirt as everyone gathers around to observe with a morbid fascination. “They were still alive. Some of them.”

Patrick blinks muzzily at Richie and says something that might be interpreted as _“whatcha doin?”_ as he’s wrapping old belts and bits of ratty rope around his wrists and ankles to secure them to the arms and legs of the chair. Richie pulls them too tight, enough that Patrick actually hisses and jerks, and a bubble of excitement wells up in his gut, sugary and sticky and not anywhere close to appropriately disturbing.

“You with me, you sick fuck?” Richie asks, crouching to tap his cheek a few times. Patrick’s head lolls. Richie hits him harder, with the full force of an open palm, the sound echoing in the relative quiet of the dump. The sting in his hand lights nerve endings he never knew existed before now, and he has the terrible, fleeting idea that maybe he could sort of understand people like Bowers, who wanted nothing more than to feel powerful for _once._

But he isn’t here to feel _powerful,_ he’s here because this is the least they can do as far as avenging the death of a loved one goes. 

“Whadda you want, Tozier?” Patrick asks, slurring concerningly, one staring pupil swelled up nearly twice the size of the other. He doesn’t seem quite able to focus on Richie’s face, or on anything at all.

“I wanna play a fucking _game,”_ Richie spits in his face, one hand going down to ease the kitchen knife out from where it’s tucked carefully into his belt. 

Patrick licks his lips and when he grins, it’s too crooked not to be unsettling. “Pretty kinky for a game to play with friends, dontcha think?”

Richie presses the edge of the blade to his throat, close enough to bite into the skin, but no more. He doesn’t have any intention of making this quick or peaceful. “You killed Eddie Kaspbrak.” It isn’t a question, because it doesn’t need to be. Bill had _seen_ him, drenched in blood and viscera, wandering through the woods on his way down to the clubhouse that day. 

The accusation makes that horrid grin stretch wider. He chipped a tooth going down after Ben knocked him out. Richie can see the missing chunk. The knife sinks into Patrick’s skin just the slightest bit deeper, a fat drop of blood welling up against the blade and dripping down his throat. “Course I did. He was all alone down there.”

For a moment, Richie thinks he’s done it -- he’s killed Patrick before he could make him _hurt_ for what he did. His vision goes black and foggy and there’s a roaring in his ears and he’s never been so angry in his _life,_ not even when he first learned of Eddie’s death, because Patrick sounds fucking _giddy_ about it and the confirmation makes hot anger burn inside him and sizzle up out of his skin. 

But Stan has one hand on his wrist where he’s holding the knife to Patrick’s throat, and the other on his shoulder, dragging him back, and he’s telling him in that steady voice to take it easy, _don’t get ahead of yourself,_ _don’t make this too gentle on him, Richie._

“I was just gonna kill him in the woods, but then I saw him climb into that hole in the ground.” Patrick shrugs. “Figured he was too quick for me to catch, but I could get him if he was cornered.”

Richie makes a strangled noise and bucks against Stan’s grip on him, but then Mike’s grabbing him, too, and Bill’s hand is on his chest as he pushes him back, towards the rest of them. “Don’t fuh-fuh-fucking ruin this, Richie.” He’s still got that detached and haunted look on his face, even days later. Richie doesn’t know what Bill’s seen. Not yet. The funeral was closed-casket, after all.

“He… _fucking…”_ Richie wheezes, realizing too late that tears are streaming down his face. He rips one hand free to scrub at his cheeks, but Patrick doesn’t seem to notice or care, anyway. “I’m not gonna kill him.” Mike still doesn’t let go, but Bill does step to the side. “I said I’m not gonna kill him. Not yet. I wanna carve him up good, first.” _He wants to do to Patrick what Patrick did to Eddie, with Bill’s guidance._ Mike loosens his grip enough for Richie to shake him off.

“This is for _all_ of us, Richie,” Ben reminds him nervously, but he shrinks into himself at the _look_ Richie gives him, because _Ben,_ more than anyone, should understand what he’s going through. 

They’ve got their own tools they brought with them, anyway. They’re welcome to come bite off a piece for themselves if that’s what they want. But they haven’t, yet, and Richie isn’t going to be able to keep the _thing_ that’s filled him with that sick, black desire at bay much longer.

“He cried real pretty,” Patrick says, slate-grey eyes still lacking any focus. Wherever he’s looking, it’s somewhere far from here. A smile curls the corners of his spit-slicked lips. “Yeah, he cried _real_ pretty.”

An _ache,_ visceral and sharp, shoots out from Richie’s chest, slicing down all the way to his fingertips. Somewhere along the way, it boils up into a _rage._ His hand twitches around the knife, _wanting._

_(would it make him any better than Hockstetter?)_

_(would it make him any worse?)_

_“Richie!”_ Patrick cries suddenly in a high, mocking voice, still smiling. _“Bill!”_ It looks more like a sneer, truly. “The fuck’s so special about the two of you?”

Richie’s hand swings up, forward, and the knife sinks deep into the meat of Patrick’s shoulder with a wet _thuk._ Patrick, for his part, lets out a muffled scream, cords in his neck straining, teeth bared. His eyes close, and when he opens them again, they’re clear. 

“How’s that feel?” Richie asks through bared teeth. Patrick hocks in the back of his throat and spits at him, but he moves aside easily to avoid it. “Not so good, huh?”

“Not as good as playing with the little queerboy,” Patrick says, and Richie’s fist connects _hard_ with his cheek but it doesn’t stop his laughter, not even when blood-tinged saliva is dripping down his chin and onto the front of his jeans. “Dunno what the fuck he thought _you_ were gonna do about it when I was cutting out his fuckin’ organs. Felt good to listen to him scream your name, though.” A full-body shudder tears through him as he tips his head back and closes his eyes, reminiscent. Richie makes the mistake of looking down and is disgusted beyond explanation to see the crotch of his pants tenting. More blood runs down his chin when he laughs again, deep from his belly yet almost impassive in its hollowness. “Least, until he couldn’t scream no more.”

Mike’s already got Richie by the waist as he yanks the blade out of Patrick’s shoulder with a disgusting _squelch,_ his anger clawing up his throat, entrenched in his rapid heartbeat, coming out as something like a growl. It’s mutant and bone-chilling and Patrick _does_ stop laughing, then, and not just because blood is gushing out of the wound Richie left, or because he screamed again when the blade tore backwards through the muscle there. He’s staring at Richie like he’s something unknown.

For once in his life, Patrick Hockstetter looks as if he might actually be _afraid._

“Can’t die anyway,” he says, almost inaudibly, almost puzzled. Hot blood runs down his arm. He twists to stare at it. “Not real anyway.”

“I’m gonna _fuckin’ kill you,”_ Richie growls in a voice barely his own. “I’m gonna fuckin’ cut you up like fuckin’ _pig,_ you--” Bev’s hand slaps over his mouth and Stan is telling him again to _take it fucking easy_ before he ruins the main event for everyone else. 

They drag him all the way back to where the rusted shells of cars are rotting away in rows upon rows, pushing him down to sit between an ancient Ford of indeterminate colour and what must have once been a decent sports car but is now just a crumbling pile of rust and broken glass. His breathing is coming too fast, and insanely he wonders if Eddie’s inhaler might help, and where is it, anyway?

Did they bury him with it?

Wouldn’t that be a fucking _joke,_ if the thing that kept him meek and agreeable most of his life, kept him quietly obedient of his mother, followed him into death, too. Wouldn’t that just be absolutely _chuckalicious?_

Richie doesn’t laugh.

“What’d he do?” Richie demands. Bill’s in front of him, trying to pry the chef’s knife from between his fingers, but Richie shakes his head, grabbing at his wrist to get his attention, _“Bill,_ what the fuck did he do?”

That taciturn hopelessness fades away all too fast, replaced by a grief so sharp Richie would swear he could feel it a hundred-fold. “You duh-duh-don’t want to know, Richie,” he says through white lips. 

“Like _fuck_ I don’t.” Richie has him by the collar now, still refusing to relinquish his grip on the knife. “I’m gonna show him exactly what Eddie felt so he knows _exactly_ what the fuck he did.”

For an unbearable stretch of time, they only stare at each other, Bill stubbornly silent, Richie stubbornly clinging to the fabric of his shirt. 

“Alright.” Bill sighs, a sepulchral and empty sound, as he squeezes one hand around Richie’s shoulder. “Alright. But not all of it, Richie. I can’t do all of it, _please.”_

_Nothing stopping them from doing it to Patrick, but_ everything _stopping him from wanting to_ remember.

“Okay, Big Bill. You lead the way.”

Bill still makes him sit out a while longer, watching moodily from between the junked cars, carving patterns in the dirt with the tip of the knife, then shallowly into the meat of his own arms. 

The first time Patrick screams, _really_ screams, Richie feels a rush of adrenaline into his veins, and then shortly, saliva flooding his mouth. He watches, enamoured, from the distance, as Ben digs into Patrick’s mouth with what looks like a pair of pliers and rips out another tooth. Patrick’s screaming crests over the mountains of garbage and spills out over the treetops. Several birds take flight.

Stan comes over to sit beside him.

Neither of them says anything. There isn’t much left to be said. Stan came round last night and it had all burst out of him in a turbulent eruption, and Stan had told him, over and over, _“I know,”_ and _“I’m sorry.”_ Now it’s just them and the quiet and the weight of old secrets. 

Stan puts an arm around Richie, drawing him in closer, but Richie isn’t going to cry on his shoulder again. Not now. Now, he’s too filled with 

_(bloodlust)_

anger for there to be any room left for his sorrow. 

They watch, together in silence, while the others take turns pulling Patrick’s teeth, until he’s _sobbing,_ blood pouring down the front of his shirt. Like he deserves. 

“What about his fingernails?” Bev is asking, voice carrying up towards them on the breeze. “Those would be fun, don’t you think?”

“Leave some for Richie,” is all Bill tells her before handing her the pliers and letting her have her turn at him.

“What will you do?” Stan asks him suddenly, and Richie shrugs as well as he can with the weight of Stan’s arm still draped over his shoulders. 

“Whatever Bill tells me to do.”

Stan huffs a half-assed laugh. “Same as usual.”

“Some things will never change, Stanny Boy,” Richie says, and then Stan’s laughter turns into something _believable_ and boisterous, and for a second Richie can almost imagine that all is right in the world, and the Lucky Seven are whole, and he’s a normal teenager on a normal late spring evening, spending time with his friends off in the woods they grew up in. 

He can almost imagine, too, a part of him that’s more human than this, screaming and begging to be set free, to see reason, to see who he really is, even as he tips his head back and laughs right alongside Stan, like wind through reeds. 

It tapers off and he’s left watching again, a spectator to a terrible circus act, Stan’s body a warm presence beside him. His fingers itch still. Patrick howls a bloody scream as another fingernail tears loose with a dull sound almost audible even from _here._

The amusement is altogether gone from his voice when he says, eyes still fixated on Patrick strapped to that inexplicable wicker chair, “He’s gotta pay, y’know? I just want to make things even.”

He wants _more_ than that. He knows it. Stan knows it. He wants to make things “even” and then some. He wants to take more than Hockstetter ever took from him, but frankly, he isn’t sure that’s possible. He isn’t sure he could be hurt any _worse_ than this, not if someone were to rip out his fingernails or cut out his organs or carve out his fucking eyeballs. And not even if Patrick were to break free and take Bill away from him, or Stan, or _any of them._

Taking Eddie was the absolute _most_ destruction he could have caused.

“Eye for an eye,” says Stan, distantly, and then Richie feels him staring, but doesn’t dare turn to look. He knows he’ll find the same vacancy in his expression he sees in Bill’s, and Mike’s, and that he could expect to see on his own when he looks in the mirror. It’ll fade eventually, he’s sure, but not before the deed is done. Stan speaks again anyway. “There are a lot of interpretations of that, did you know? But I think the most important one is this: _‘An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.’”_

Richie turns that one over a couple times in his head. “So be it,” he says, shrugging, watching intently as Bill stops Bev from driving the pliers into Patrick’s eye. 

“I always thought the world was blind enough already. Don’t you?”

“Sure,” Richie says. “What difference will it make?"

“Yeah. Exactly.” He doesn’t have to look to see Stan’s smile. Bill wrestles the pliers from Beverly, who has gone dull-eyed and vacant as any of them, a spatter of blood decorating her chin, a manic grin twisting her face. 

Bill whistles and waves to get Richie’s attention, as if he didn’t already have it. 

And that’s it. Easy as that. This town 

_(It)_

will make a murderer out of Richie yet.

Still, the thought doesn’t appall him as it should.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with making things right, _can you dig it?_

Nothing wrong with _an eye for an eye,_ nothing wrong with _a tooth for a tooth,_ and ain’t nothing wrong with _making the whole world blind_

_(more blind than it already is to the plight of others, that is, isn’t it?)_

As Richie makes to stand, something catches his eye. He reaches out to brush dirt away from Abraham Lincoln’s oxidized face, then snorts loudly as he pinches the lucky penny between his thumb and forefinger, holding it up for Stan to see. “Need all the luck we can get, right?”

“Right,” Stan says, and smiles at him with those dull brown eyes.

“Don’t wanna get caught playing judge, jury, and executioner out here in the forbidden lands, right?”

“Right,” Stan says again. Richie pockets the coin. 

When Richie approaches, Bill’s standing behind Patrick with his hands clamped around his face, fingers biting into his jawbone, fingernails cutting open the skin there. “You wanna do what he did?” Bill asks, haunted, as Richie fiddles with the knife and eyes the dip of his collarbone visible above his shirt. He’ll start low, below his navel, and work his way up to that point, shredding sinew and flesh and scraping bone, but he won’t go deep. Not deep enough to kill. He’ll have to keep him alive as long as possible, if he wants to feel satisfied.

At least, until he can’t scream no more.

But Bill doesn’t start _there._ Bill traces his index finger at a diagonal across Patrick’s cheek, from a point by the corner of his mouth up towards his ear. “Right there, Rich,” he tells him, and a smile twists his features. Patrick’s crying, breath jumping and tears streaking down his cheeks. Richie never would have thought it possible.

Maybe his ability to feel genuine happiness _hasn't_ altogether vanished. 

“No,” Patrick burbles around a mouthful of blood, as Richie raises the point of the blade to his cheek. 

“Like this, Big Bill?” he asks, and finds that he’s almost _drooling_ again. It’s exhilarating, to see him bleed and cry and beg. 

It’s _powerful._

“Yeah, like that,” Bill tells him, holding Patrick even as he bucks and struggles and tries to wrench himself free. “Straight through.”

Richie nods. He doesn’t push in yet, just watches Patrick’s wild eyes roll and lets the power marinate for a while. Lets his panic mount as he awaits the inevitable.

_Not so cocky now._

“Why?” Richie asks, simply enough. Patrick’s frightened -- _frightened! Patrick Hockstetter; imagine that! --_ gaze lands on him and he makes a wet noise that might be interpreted as, “Huh?”

“Why’d you do _this_ to him?” Richie asks, because the answer, for Patrick, can’t just be power, and it certainly can’t be revenge, and he can’t fathom a good enough reason why anyone would want to hurt Eddie Kaspbrak, let alone _kill_ him, and certainly he can’t begin to imagine why anyone would want to draw it out and make him _suffer._ “In fact, why’d you do it at all? What the fuck’s wrong with you that you’d hurt him like that?”

“I don’t hafta fuckin’ tell you,” Patrick snarls through bloodied lips.

Richie taps the blade against his cheek, then withdraws it. “If you do, I won’t stab you in the face. I just wanna get in your head, Pat. Know you a little better.”

Visibly torn between suspicion and the desperation of near-belief, Patrick shakes his head at him. “I ain’t fuckin’ stupid.”

“Your IQ score would beg to differ.” Richie shrugs. “Besides, if you _want_ me to stab your ugly mug, that’s on you, I guess.”

There’s a beat of silence shared between them. Close behind Richie, back towards the car graveyard, he hears Bev giggle and the smell of cigarette smoke wafts past. A cricket starts up somewhere nearby. Patrick swallows what was probably a solid mouthful of blood from the gaping holes left behind by his several missing teeth. Richie raises the knife again.

“I wanted to play with him a little, y’know?” Richie doesn’t know, not the way Patrick means it. Or, maybe he does, if this is what _play_ can be like. “I follow him around sometimes. I always wanted to play with him, y’get me? I’m sure _you_ get me.” That slack smile is back. Richie’s possessed by the sudden urge to cut it off. “I followed him down into the Barrens. Thought maybe I’d try. Maybe if I asked real nice, he’d let me. Then I saw him go into that hole and…” Here, he shrugs as well as he can with his arms bound. “I figured if he was trapped down there, I wouldn’t hafta ask at all.”

A shudder rips through Bill. His hands around Patrick’s head falter. _What’d he do,_ exactly? Richie wants to ask, but he’s not sure he wants the whole answer. 

“Put a knife through his cheek ‘cause I always see you touching him there. ‘Cause he was _soft._ I wanted to know how it _felt.”_

Richie leans in close. _Real_ fuckin’ close. Patrick tries to lean back as he and Richie come nose to nose, but Bill’s still got him in a firm grip. “Did it feel _good?”_

“All of it felt good,” Patrick says with mocking earnesty, so Richie takes a step back, swings up, and shoves the blade through his cheek, right where Bill showed him. It sinks through the soft meat there with little resistance, and the momentum brings the handle flat to his cheek. When Richie looks, he can see the tip of the blade coming out the other side of his face. Patrick’s eyes bulge, red veins popping out all along the edges, and the scream that tears out of him is _garbled_ and strange with the foreign object taking up so much space in his mouth.

More ruby-bright blood spills over his lips, coating his chin and reflecting the dying light of the day.

Richie takes his time sliding the knife back out, relishing the feeble, muffled sound of Patrick’s agony and the way more blood follows the blade on the way out, pouring down his cheek.

Briefly, Richie finds himself wondering how much blood is _too_ much to lose, and how much longer they have to play when Patrick is bleeding from several places in his face, and his shoulder, and from the tips of his fingers where only a few fingernails remain attached. Not to mention the potential brain bleed, if his uneven pupils are anything to go by.

“What else?”

“Fuck you!” Patrick sputters, spitting blood everywhere. “You said you _wouldn’t!”_

“Shut the fuck up,” Richie snaps at him. He doesn’t think to, doesn’t even process his intent to do it, let alone the act itself, but his fist connects with Patrick’s nose and it gives under his knuckles with a crunch and a _pop!_ “What else, Bill?”

“His eye,” Bill says. “The right one.”

“Just the one?” Bill nods. Richie feels a muscle in his jaw tick. It’s revulsion, mostly, that churns up a sick feeling in his stomach and burns like acid in his chest and up his throat. Eddie’s fucking _eyes._ He wants nothing more than to rip Patrick to shreds.

_(it’s a damn good thing the funeral was closed-casket)_

_Eddie’s eye his_ eye _how dare Patrick touch his_ eyes _Richie was so in love with them_ too _in love with them and it’s too much, too much to imagine what Patrick must have done, to imagine how that must have felt, to imagine Eddie hurting and Eddie crying out for him, and Richie was too terribly in love with him to_ function _without him, there’s no way_

_no fucking way_

Richie twists his fingers into his hair and drives the point of the knife into Patrick’s eye, barely refraining from pushing deep enough to go straight to his brain, kill him on the fucking spot, _God he wants to so fucking bad, can’t wait for him to burn in hell._

“Fuck you,” he says in that awful growling voice that he’s positive doesn’t belong to him. _“Fuck you.”_

He doesn’t need to ask Patrick _why_ this time. He understands well enough himself. His disgust at the notion of Patrick ever entertaining those fantasies, of ever thinking of Eddie even _close_ to the same way as him, is nauseating in its potency. Eddie has

_(had)_

soft cheeks and beautiful doleful eyes and a sharp tongue, a quick wit and bad lungs (or bad anxieties, at least), trim legs and a sprint nearly as fast as that wit of his. 

Richie can _understand,_ but his and Patrick’s reactions to their attraction were worlds apart, and now here they are: Eddie dead, the remaining Losers pissed beyond reason, Patrick strapped into a chair while they draw out his death as long as they can. 

Bill trades out Richie’s knife for the pliers, and walks him through the process of ripping out his last few fingernails. They come easily, once he’s dug deep enough into the nail bed to get a firm grip with the pliers. Patrick tries to curl his hands into fists to prevent Richie from digging the nose of the tool under the nail, clamping down and lifting, pulling, until the keratin plate of his nail tears free from the sensitive tissue beneath and -- with a musical ripping -- comes free altogether. Bill presses his hand to the arm of the chair and pins his fingers down to make it easier on Richie.

Patrick bitches and cries and begs all the while, skin going sallow and sweat beading on the sides of his face, refracting the glow of the sunset in orange-yellow-pink as it goes. Richie snaps back at some point that “Maybe if you didn’t want to get _hurt_ you shouldn’t have hurt someone _else,_ you fucking _psycho,”_ and when Patrick spits blood at him and tells him he’s doing just the same, Richie rams the pliers into his oozing eye socket and this time, his screams are hoarse and weak. 

He lets Stan have at it for a while. They _all_ take their turns, sipping at the nectar of revenge, sharing cigarettes amongst themselves, pinched between bloodied fingers, discussing their next steps like they’d discuss the weather forecast. 

“I wanna cut off his ear,” Bev says, giggling, smoke hissing out between her bared teeth. “Can I? I think maybe I’d like to keep it.” And then the giggles turn into raucous laughter, needle-sharp and unsettling to the core, and Richie can’t help but join her. He’s taken to carving on himself again as he waits, sitting on a patch of grass now, much closer to where Bill is driving a knife through Patrick’s forearm, just below the elbow, directly between the bones. 

Richie thinks, half-crazed with laughter, that if he went any lower he’d cut right through an artery and Patrick would bleed out before Richie could make him _really_ hurt. But he doesn’t, because Bill knows better, or at least _something_ here knows better, and he’s gotta stay alive, just until the Losers are satisfied with their work.

_Will they ever be?_

Richie laughs _more_ at that, until he’s leaning on Beverly and wheezing with it, leaving a bloody handprint behind on her bare shoulder. 

It’s unlikely they’re ever going to _want_ to be done, but they can’t keep Patrick alive _forever._ They have tonight, under the glow of sunset, to work, and that’s all they can give themselves. He won’t _survive_ much longer than that with the extent of the injuries they’re inflicting. He’ll have bled out come tomorrow. 

“Bev, you can do whatever the fuck you want,” he says, wiping tears of mirth from his face. “I mean, really, who the fuck’s gonna stop us?” And that gets Mike going, too.

“Maybe...” Her voice drops to a whisper as she casts a furtive glance in Ben’s direction. He’s preoccupied with staring at Bill, keenly observing the way he’s handling Patrick, mesmerized by the dull sound of fists on flesh. Bill’s crying -- they all see it, but now isn’t the time to acknowledge it. He needs to get it out, before it poisons him

_(more)_

“Maybe I’ll cut off both,” she tells him with a wink, tongue poking out the side of her mouth. A sick feeling crawls into his stomach, not because he doesn’t see the romance in the gesture. 

The trouble is that he _does,_ and he’ll never get to--

“I… I think that’s a good idea,” he tells her around the nauseating loneliness, squeezing lightly at her shoulder. “I bet he’d like that.”

Still, he can’t help the 

*

_tension creeping into his muscles, his heart frantic, trapped in his stiff rib cage, even as he told himself to_ relax, just relax, _even as he reminded himself_ don’t move too much.

_Bev stifled laughter behind her hand when she caught sight of him from across the clubhouse. He knew without needing to_ know _that his eyes were bugging out behind his oversized glasses, his panic splashed across his face plain as day._

‘Help me,’ _he mouthed at her, but she set her drink down and turned back to her sketchbook, the smirk still fixed on her lips, and Richie would have flipped her off if he weren’t so afraid of_ moving. _Eddie twitched against him and he could have_ sworn _he was going to vomit his heart out right there in the hammock, just fucking_ die, _and it would be all Eddie’s fault_

_(and somehow he’d be just fine with that)_

_because Eddie fucking Kaspbrak was sound asleep against him -- hell, half on_ top _of him. He’d just forced his way into the hammock with him, like usual, shoulder-to-shoulder so he could read the latest copy of_ Black Panther _with Richie, instead of, y’know, waiting ten minutes for his own turn with it. And then he just put his head on Richie’s shoulder and zonked the fuck out, just like that._

_Which would be_ fine, _would be just_ dandy, _would be fucking peaches and cream, sunshine and goddamn rainbows, if Richie weren’t so fucking_ gone _for him._

_Alas, he_ was, _and his heart was beating in his throat by then, making a valiant attempt at suffocating him, while Eddie drooled on his sleeve and shuffled around to drape a leg over Richie’s, both his arms still wrapped around Richie’s bicep, and_ what the fuck.

_What the fuck did he do for the universe to want to punish him like this? Was the fucking Turtle that puked up the universe (or whatever looneytunes bullshit Bill had spewed)_ that _pissed at him for taking its name in vain? Fuck him for needing a swear word that wouldn’t get him grounded, right?_

This is fine, _he told himself, transfixed on the way Eddie’s eyelashes brushed his cheeks as he snored away, tucked into his side like he just fucking belonged there (he did, though, didn’t he?)_ This is _fine,_ just don’t make it weird. Don’t make it weird, _he repeated to himself, several times over, as Eddie fidgeted against him again and his thigh went to_ all _the wrong places and Richie, helpless against the wrath of teenage hormones, slapped a hand over his red face and tried not to scream. Misfortune was one son of a bitch, and it had him in a stranglehold._

_Still, once he could calm himself enough to just breathe, and will away any body part-related mishaps, and once Bev stopped laughing at his (completely reasonable) panic, maybe he could see the merit in the situation. Like, first of all, Eddie trusting him enough to just_ casually _take a nap there in the hammock with him. And Eddie’s_ proximity, _which was nothing unusual in itself but was even better prolonged like this. And that he could stare for as long as he wanted without getting caught (not counting Bev’s presence in the clubhouse with them)._

_Or, if he_ really _wanted (he did, yes,_ of course _he wanted to, so he_ did) _he could reach up with his free hand and run his fingers through_

*

his hair, now soaked in blood, which is congealing in sticky clumps, twisting and pulling hard enough to drag a low, pained noise from Patrick.

“You look better without them,” Richie taunts, dragging his fingernails over the mess of tissue where his ear used to be. “Bev knows what she’s doing.”

There’s a giggle and a snort and a playful, “Thanks!” from behind him, and Bill, at his shoulder, huffs quietly.

“Fuh… Fuck _you,”_ Patrick grumbles, gracelessly attempting to extract himself from the grip Richie has on his hair. Both of his eyes are gruesomely swollen, a combined effort from Bill and Ben, and the bruise from multiple blows to the nose fans out across his cheeks like some sick bastardization of wings. Richie smiles down at him, all sharp teeth and pale blue eyes and a ravenous joy that doesn’t sit right no matter how good it _wants_ to feel. “Let me go.”

“Did Eddie ask you to let him go?” Richie asks, pulling harder on Patrick’s hair now, hard enough that a clump comes loose in his hand. Patrick doesn’t answer. He grabs for his knife again and sets the point against the slit in his cheek, still oozing, though much more slowly now. Drying blood is bloating at the corners. “Did he?”

Patrick curls his lip at him and snaps, “Yeah, he fuckin’ did. Course he fuckin’ did. Kid was a damn crybaby, wasn’t he? Couldn’t even take a little bit of--”

Richie cuts him off by slicing the rest of the way through his cheek, clean to the corner of his mouth, and the fatty tissue there flops right over to hang off his jaw, leaving him with an obscene crooked smile that exposes all the teeth on that side of his mouth (and the dark spaces where several are now missing, thanks to the combined effort of the other Losers). Patrick’s mouth opens and closes a few more times -- the chunk of flesh dangling by his chin now jumps and jiggles with the motion -- before he leans forward and vomits forcefully. Most of it ends up on his lap, which sets him cursing and shouting, shimmying his immobilized legs and gnashing his exposed teeth. Mike and Stan just finished flaying bits of skin from his shins and thighs. His pants are pushed down around his ankles and the flesh on display there is red and raw where it isn’t actively bleeding. His sick seeps into the shallow wounds, and as the acid burns the tender tissue there he starts up a chant of, _“Fuck you fuck you fuck you Tozier fuck you fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou,”_ that makes the split skin of his face flap vigorously and, in turn, makes Richie laugh again. 

“What else do you got for me, Bill?” Richie asks, almost cheerfully, and Bill reflects it with ease. 

“Break his arms,” Bill tells him, and his grin goes wider, more manic (more menacing) as he emphasizes, _“Both_ his arms.”

_(so he can’t fight back)_

Richie understands. He understands all too well, _why_ exactly Patrick would do that. He’s violently reminded of how Eddie looked with his arm all wrapped up in a plaster cast all those summers ago, and of his refusal to let it stop him from doing anything. His adamance that he didn’t need any help, and he didn’t need to be coddled, and he didn’t need to be doted on. How he’d scribbled out the very word they use to define themselves (the thing that sets them apart from the rest) and changed it to something better, something more uplifting. How he’d told Richie, shyly, when he asked: _“‘Cause you always say_ ‘I’m a lover, not a fighter,’ _and I know it’s just a saying, but I also know you mean it.”_

_“I’ve definitely done some fighting in my day,”_ he’d responded cheekily, but Eddie had only smiled in that soft and fragile way of his and said, _“I know, but I also know how you_ mean _it.”_

If only Eddie could see him now.

He’s reminded, too, of who exactly broke Eddie’s arm back then, and who beat him and held him down while it happened, and who spat in his face after the fact. 

Richie isn’t aware he’s going to spit until the glob of mucus and saliva lands on Patrick’s cheek and mixes with his blood.

“Sure thing, Bill,” he says coldly.

Bill reaches into his bag and passes Richie -- of all things -- a pipe wrench, and at Richie’s awed look he shrugs and explains, “I took it from the garage. Dad’s got all sorts of crap in there. I’ll put it back when we’re done.” Same as they would with their mother’s kitchen knives, and the various tools or odds and ends they’d brought along just in case, and even with this old wicker chair that had come to them by merry fortune, or the convoluted mechanisms of fate (or both, if this fate could ever be conflated with fortune).

“Don’tchyoo fuckin’ dare,” Patrick hisses all in one jumbled breath, straining his arms against the belts and the ropes holding him in place, and his swollen eyes are _wild_ as Richie lifts the wrench up over his head, clasped in both hands, and brings it down with all his strength. 

He’s not sure what’s louder: the crunch and snap of bone, or the guttural and agonized scream that tears up out of Patrick. The arm of the chair holds up well against the blow -- better than Patrick’s bones, at least. The swiftly-discolouring flesh of his arm sits strangely now, protruding in uneven lumps where the bones have shifted out of place. 

Still, something is missing. He tells Bill as much. There isn’t the right kind of thrill in using tools to do all the work for him.

No, he wants to use his bare hands, the same way Bowers and Hockstetter did to Eddie back in ‘89 when they broke his arm, and -- he can only imagine (though he doesn’t _want_ to) -- the way Hockstetter did _again_ in their underground clubhouse, because Eddie _was_ a fighter, and he’d have fought back tooth and nail (and likely emerged victorious) had Patrick not found a way to stop him.

Wordlessly, Bill begins untying Patrick’s other arm, keeping a firm hand on his wrist to stop any sudden movements, but as far as Richie can tell, he’s halfway to delirium, mouth gaping, eyes rolling and losing focus again, seized by full-body shivers. If he’s even aware of what’s happening, he doesn’t seem to be in much of a state to take advantage of it. 

Richie takes Patrick’s wrist in his hands once he’s untied, while Bill moves to stand behind him, planting both hands against his upper back and forcing him to lean forward. If Richie bends his arm backwards to leverage it against the back post of the chair, it won’t take much effort to break the bone in his upper arm. He twists a little too hard on purpose as he forces the arm back and up, and all at once presses all his weight forward against it -- it gives easily, one clean _crack_ that has red-tinged spittle flying from Patrick’s mouth as he tries to bite back a pained cry.

“Yeah, that’s better,” he says softly, maybe to himself or Bill; maybe to Patrick, who’s seething and twitching as Richie forces his arm forward again with a disconcerting grating and an audible popping in his shoulder joint, holding him still while Bill ties him down again. “That feels better, doesn’t it?” he asks, and this time it’s certainly _directed_ at Patrick, but he’s gone all warm and almost _(almost)_ relaxed just from the sensation of the bone giving way under his hands.

Patrick, wisely, elects not to respond.

Richie sticks a finger into the sluggishly-bleeding hole in his gum where a tooth _used_ to be. “You pull any for me?”

“Of course.” Bill’s fingers press to the suspiciously reddened breast pocket of his worn plaid shirt. They come away stained with the blood that’s seeping through the fabric.

“You pull any for Eddie?”

“Oh,” says Bill, and his face goes taut as he shakes his head. “No. Do you--?”

Richie’s holding his hand out for the pliers again before he can even ask. “Fuck you,” Patrick growls wretchedly, writhing and jerking to get his head -- his _mouth_ \-- away from Richie. Bill, ever willing to lend a hand where one Loser or another may need it, wraps one arm around his throat, setting Patrick’s chin in the crook of his elbow, and the other over the top of his head, to hold him in place while Richie takes what is owed. If he so desired, it would be laughably easy to snap Patrick’s neck in that position. Kill him on the spot. But they haven’t helped him earn that, yet. 

It will come. Whether it’s by Bill breaking his neck or Richie driving a tool too deep into his eye or Stan hitting an artery, it will come for him.

“My dad’s a dentist,” Richie informs Patrick cheerfully as he reaches the tip of the pliers through the hole in his face to pinch at one of his remaining teeth -- the second premolar, if Wentworth Tozier taught him right. It won’t give without some work, but that’s just as well. He wants to draw this out for dear Patrick. Make him hurt even just _half_ as much as Richie will be hurting for the rest of his life. “Did you know that? Bet he’s probably done some of these fillings for you. You ever fucking floss, Hockstetter? You wouldn’t have so many goddamn cavities if you’d just floss once in a while.”

Patrick says something muffled around the intrusion in his mouth (if Richie’s got any skill for making inferences, it’s probably, “Fuck you”). He jerks again, quite suddenly, rocking the chair he’s trapped in, but Bill doesn’t lose his grip, and Richie doesn’t lose his concentration. He adjusts the position of the pliers and continues to swivel, pull, and jiggle the tooth he’s chosen, loosening the gum clinging so desperately to it, twisting the root much deeper below the surface, until the first rivulets of fresh blood make their appearance where they’ve begun to split apart. It _crunches_ as he works it faster, pulling harder, feeling the tooth breaking free with great resistance, and Patrick’s making an effort to kick his feet on the ground in spite of his bindings and rock the chair as much as he’s able, even with his head and neck restrained as they are. 

Patrick utters a strangled scream around the tool jammed into his mouth as the tooth comes free with a _crack_ and a rush of blood. Tears glisten on the bruised skin around his eyes.

Richie can’t help but wonder, in a fit of exalted self-satisfaction, if Wentworth would be proud of him.

“There, now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asks, patting Patrick’s un-mutilated cheek firmly with his free hand as he holds the tooth up against the fading light for him to see. “Seven teeth in one day. Must be lucky.”

He pockets this one for himself. Sure, Bill might be holding onto the rest to distribute later, or otherwise display in the clubhouse as tokens of their triumph, but this one will stay with Richie. Because he earned it, or because it means something a little _more_ \-- he isn’t sure. 

“What else do I need to do, Bill?” He wipes the pliers on the leg of his pants, as if they aren’t _covered_ in gore as it is. Patrick’s head flops forward, chin to his chest, blood dripping steadily onto his bare lap and mixing with his vomit. His breathing comes shallow and ragged. 

The time for games, Richie knows, is drawing to a close.

Everyone else knows, too, without a word being spoken, because the card game going on in the patchy grass ends abruptly, and one by one the other Losers gather in close behind him. Stan’s shoulder presses to his. Mike’s breath is warm against the back of his neck. Beverly’s hand finds his and their fingers tangle together as she squeezes. _I’m here,_ the gesture says, _we’re here._

“Gut him,” says Bill in a far-off voice, and he’s giving the knife back to Richie, and it’s _heavy,_ too heavy, but it’s _necessary._

“How do you want me to do it?” he asks next, and tries not to picture what he’s about to do being done to _Eddie,_ because that’s too much, that’s too _far,_ that’s all his worst nightmares coiled up into one vicious, biting, venomous monstrosity 

_(and here it sits, right here in front of him, its lifeblood draining into the packed earth around them)_

Bill’s hand on his wrist guides him. The presence of the rest of his friends fades away into nonexistence all around him. Spine to the ground, edge to the sky, Bill brings the point of the knife to rest just above the band of Patrick’s ratty boxers, then stops and lets go. “Here, like this. In, but not too deep, and then straight up, to his collarbone.”

“Okay, Big Bill,” Richie says, and his voice shakes, strangely, and he’s convinced for a moment he can almost _see,_ in his own mind, the way Bill found Eddie, the warm blood still soaking into the foundations of their childhood hideaway, the hole in his cheek from a small blade, bite marks _(bite marks?)_ on his throat and his bare shoulders, his arms and his otherwise untouched cheek. He can see the drying tears and the staring eyes and the exposed innards, a heart still trying to beat visible in his chest cavity. And it

_(IT)_

comes flooding back into him, that fury he can’t find a proper way to suppress, the pain of loss, the desire for revenge, the nauseatingly potent _emptiness_ that’s been left behind.

The blade cuts through his skin with resistance, catching on layers of flesh and fat and muscle. He _knows_ when to stop, when to adjust his grip and draw the blade _upwards_ instead, as Patrick shakes and howls in his restraints. It glides up, blood searing his fingers as it spills out of the clean line from crotch to clavicle, scrapes briefly over bone (Patrick shouts hoarsely and then quiets, only breathless whimpers from him now), and comes to a stop. 

The meat of his belly bulges outward grotesquely where it’s been split apart. A fetid smell wafts out from his insides. The stench of things never meant to be exposed to the open air like this. Blood and bile and all the inner mechanisms of the body on their way to being made _outer_ mechanisms.

“Well, Pat, karma’s a bitch, isn’t she?” Richie says around the rising nausea (around the _panic_ of the version of himself that’s too weak and too fragile to handle any of this).

Patrick lifts his head to blink blearily at him. He’s seeing something much farther away than any of them now. He’s seeing what Richie’s afraid of, yet deadly curious about at the same time. A series of events that ultimately brought them _here,_ to this moment, and that he can be sure Patrick took a sick amount of pleasure in, one way or another.

“Kuh… Karma don’t mean _shit,_ Tozier. I’m still gonna be the winner here, no matter what. You wanna-- You wanna… know why?” he wheezes, and Richie thinks that, _no,_ he isn’t so sure he _does_ want to know, but Patrick continues unprompted anyway, a scarlet-tinged smile contorting his disfigured face. “‘Cause I got to have him, and you didn’t, and now he’s in the ground, so I win, don’t I?”

Bill punches him -- his fist comes flying seemingly out of nowhere and lands a heavy blow across Patrick’s carved-up cheek, knuckles cracking against his teeth, likely knocking a few more loose. 

And Richie; Richie feels whatever sense of calm and rationality he’s been operating under go up in flames, just like that, disappearing right alongside Bill’s commendable restraint. 

Patrick laughs, high and stuttering, and as the muscles in his abdomen shift, the protrusion of his organs against the skin grows. With whatever was holding him back now smoke and ashes, he lifts the knife once more and slams it down, directly into Patrick’s groin, and he sure as fuck isn’t laughing _now._ In fact, his remaining eye pops almost comically and his whole body goes tight and tense, another tide of blood spurting out from the hole Richie left in his belly. 

He snatches the knife back again and Patrick’s mouth flaps like that of a dying fish, hands straining to reach down and cup his mutilated genitals. Blood is spreading across his lap, rapid and dark, staining his underwear and pooling beneath him.

Richie doesn’t hesitate to plunge his hand into the warm cavity of Patrick’s gut and grab at the first thing he finds. His fingers close around a mucusy bit of intestine; it makes a slick sound as he drags it out through Patrick’s split abdominal muscles. The tissue bulges between his fingers. 

He drops the knife and grabs for more with that hand, extracting a long trail of intestine, bit by bit. A second set of hands appears beside his, and he’s suddenly aware of that _growling_ again, rolling up out of his chest, and how inhuman it is. Bev’s fingers sink into the gap in Patrick’s skin, curling inwards and prying it apart to reveal _all_ of him. It tears, loudly, when she pulls and _keeps_ pulling, and more blood gushes up out of him, but that’s alright, Richie’s sure. They’re almost done, anyway. 

Patrick’s head flops against his shoulder, but he isn’t dead, not yet. His eyelids flutter. A low groan rumbles through him, and Richie can feel it when he reaches inside again and pulls a kidney free, dropping it at his feet. 

Mike’s hands join his, disappearing inside of Patrick and slipping back out covered in blood, some unidentifiable mass clenched in his fists (Richie’s well-versed in dentistry thanks to his father, but his anatomical knowledge is otherwise limited). It pulsates and oozes, and then comes loose and falls still, and Richie catches a smile on Mike’s face, even in his frenzy

_(Patrick didn’t he_ couldn’t have _he doesn’t want to think about that)_

even as he feels tears dripping off of his chin

_(doesn’t dare entertain the notion)_

even though his sole focus is on _inflicting as much pain as possible._

Maybe he’s smiling, too. Maybe he’s only crying. “Fuck you, Hockstetter,” he tries to say, but he isn’t sure it comes out coherent.

Still, Patrick’s gaze lands on him -- the eye Richie popped weeps a milky, viscous liquid that mixes with his blood and runs like thick pink tears down his cheek; the other holds nothing but cold, grey hatred, and the spiteful resignation of a man on the verge of death. 

A moan bubbles up from his throat as Stan’s hand dips into the hole in his torso to inflict more damage, then Ben’s, and finally Bill’s, and his body gives a torpid convulsion. The moan is followed shortly by a dribble of bile. His remaining eye sits wide in its socket.

“Okay,” Richie says, incognizant of his plan to even speak at all; the sound of his own voice surprises him. “Okay,” he says again, more firmly, and several sets of dirtied hands withdraw from the space around him. 

He kneels on the blood-soaked earth in front of Patrick. “I don’t know if there’s a hell, Hockstetter. I don’t believe in any of that religion bullshit. I don’t much fucking care if there’s a heaven, either. But if there _is_ a hell after all this, you’re going to fucking burn there, you hear me?”

He reaches into the purged cavity of Patrick’s abdomen, crooks his elbow, and follows the sluggish feeling of his heartbeat to its source. Something pulls and _pops_ and there’s a rush of warm liquid as he reaches up, _up,_ into his chest, into the space where his lungs struggle for air, sickly hot everywhere, _foul_ in ways a former version of himself would never have been able to bear.

“You....” Patrick chokes out, stuttering horribly over the single syllable. _“You,”_ he tries again, but he doesn’t get a chance to finish 

_(“you, too”)_

because Richie’s fingers close around his

*

_heart, fluttering against his ribs, and surely he was red all over, but it was_ fine. _It was_ good.

_At least, he couldn’t exactly_ complain _about the position._

_He’d never ask for anything more than to lie with his friends under the stars for a night. Meteor showers aside (Ben and Mike had been talking about it nonstop all month, and the excitement inevitably caught on), he would come out here just to spend time with them_ any _old night._

_“You have to think_ outside _the box!” Bev chastised playfully, turning Eddie’s bug repellant on Richie to aim a blast at his face. Eddie dove behind him for cover, and his heart beat somehow_ faster, _the proximity_ overwhelming. _He was just drunk enough to be losing control of his emotions, and Eddie was just drunk enough to be_ too _affectionate -- together, those things made a recipe for Richie to spontaneously combust. Eddie had been hanging off his arm or rubbing his cheek against his shoulder or wrestling him into (painfully) tight hugs for the better part of an hour now, and he felt death creeping up on him._

_“I’m_ trying, _I just...”_ God, _he couldn’t think at all. Eddie’s knees pressed to his back as he hid from Bev, his giggles vibrating against Richie’s shoulder where he had his face pressed, and his fingers were clamped around his bicep, and Richie was fucking done for._

_“Richie’s superpower would be--” Eddie cut himself off with another raucous giggle fit, just contagious enough that Bev spat a mouthful of warm beer everywhere, even though neither of them had any idea what was so funny._

_Stan appeared behind her, silhouetted against the stars. “Bill says to have a wish ready when the shooting stars come,” he teased, and Eddie giggle-snorted behind Richie, and Richie was dying, did he mention that?_

_“Stan!” Eddie relinquished his grip on Richie’s arm long enough to flap a hand in Stan’s direction to get his attention, as if the shouting wasn’t enough. “Stan, what would Richie’s superpower be?”_

_“Being a nuisance,” Stan answered without hesitation, accepting the beer Bev handed to him. “Why?”_

_“‘Cause we’re gonna wish for superpowers, Stan, keep up,” Richie said, while Stan rolled his eyes._

_Bev stretched a bare foot out to jab him in the side. “Bad luck to tell someone your wish.”_

_“We doan need no stinkin’ luck,” Richie retorted in his trusted old Pancho Vanilla Voice, flipping her off. Stan passed the beer on to him. It was one of their last bottles, so they were rationing. A bunch of sixteen-year-olds could only get their hands on so much booze at a time, after all._

_“I dunno,” Bev said, now planting both her feet in his lap, leaning back on her hands and tipping her face up to watch the sky. “I could always use some.”_

_“Alright.” Richie raised the beer out in front of himself. “To better luck, then,” he said before taking a swig. “And lots of good sex,” he added, for good measure, which had Bev kicking him again, and Eddie laughing fiercely against his shoulder even as he told him_ “that’s gross” _and to shut up._

_Richie coaxed him around to sit beside him, then, and even though his heartbeat was deafening in his own ears, he fought against his better judgment to let one arm hang loosely around his waist, “‘Cause you might fall over, you little fuckin’ alcoholic.” Eddie grabbed at the beer but Richie tossed it towards Mike, who was just approaching, unfolding another picnic blanket he’d retrieved from his truck. Mike caught it, though some of the foaming drink sloshed out and stained the front of his shirt._

_“I’m closer to cutting you off every second,” he threatened blithely._

_Richie was piecing together a good retort in his booze-addled mind when Eddie gasped and smacked him so hard on the chest that it left him winded. He didn’t have to wonder why the fuck Eddie was beating him up -- a flash of light in his periphery caught his attention, and in the time it took him to turn and look, it had fizzled out and left a nothingness in its wake, and Eddie was already shaking him like a damn ragdoll and loudly informing him that he saw a shooting star._

_“I know, I know, I saw it, too,” Richie told him, placing a hand over Eddie’s to make him stop trying to rattle his brain in his skull. In that moment, he’d been terribly aware of his smallness -- how he was nothing more than a speck of a speck of a speck in the universe. Too much exposure to the bare night sky could do that to a person; the stars were unfathomable enough in their own right without the added profundity of bits of the cosmos burning up in the atmosphere of the speck you lived on._

_He’d also been terribly aware, then, of other things. His breath in his lungs, for one. Too heavy to feel natural. Eddie’s hands on him. The clarity of the knowledge they unlucky few possessed. That the composition and origin of their universe was stranger than any person’s imagination had yet come up with, and that Turtles were_ important _in ways he’d never be able to explain, not to anyone outside of this group of seven, and that things beyond even_ that _held an importance of more gravity, somehow, and that things not meant to exist still existed, and that fate always had been and always would be already woven, a structure maintaining a precarious and careful balance._

_How they, even as kids (and long before then, he knows; long before any of them were born or thought of or even_ possible) _had been chosen for roles beyond their understanding and had been driven by a force beyond their comprehension to fulfill them._

_Then, dragging his gaze away from the_ dark, _from the depths of space he’d never quite be able to grasp, he’d been aware of only one thing, and that was that Eddie Kaspbrak looked beautiful in the moonlight, and that, in a different, better universe, Richie would seize the opportunity to kiss him, then and there._

_Even uninhibited by alcohol, he knows enough to stop himself. He’s smart enough to_ know _it’s a bad idea, and that it could only ever end in disaster, but that doesn’t stop him from_ wanting, _and it never will._

Maybe one day, _he told himself, as he always did._ When things are better. When we’re somewhere better.

_Eddie was staring up at the sky streaked with lights, not with wariness or uncertainty, but with awe and wonder. There had been nothing for him to fear, not from the vastness of the universe or the stars themselves or the fate they’d been forced to adhere to. Just polite amazement at the miracles of science they could bear witness to._

_He_ could have _kissed him then, not on the lips as he wanted, but on the cheek, right on the heart sticker with the peeling edges that Richie had stuck to his face that morning while they hid themselves away in the attic room above the Kaspbraks’ garage (Eddie had retaliated by slapping a banana sticker in the middle of Richie’s forehead, which is also still there, partially hidden behind his hair). He could have played it off as teasing, could have blown a raspberry onto his cheek, could have blamed the alcohol they’d been consuming for a couple hours now._

_Too conscious of his own feelings and of his own actions, he’d only curled the arm around his waist tighter, praying he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, desperate to take what he could without overstepping. And he’d thought, again,_ maybe one day.

_But Richie was a coward, plain and simple. Richie_

*

is drenched head-to-toe in blood. Bits of tissue cling to his hands and the fabric of his clothes. There are unnameable substances caked under his fingernails.

He’s emerged as a victor in a game he never meant to set out to play, and somehow, it doesn’t feel like it at all. 

It felt _good,_ killing Patrick -- felt good to tear his beating heart from his chest and watch him convulse, eyes rolling, agonal respirations 

_(Eddie taught him that; Eddie taught him that after he took that first aid training course in Bangor)_

his last cry for mercy.

But the hollowness, it’s returning, too quickly. He looks at Patrick’s body as they drag it out of the dump and that’s all he sees: a body. A meaningless shell. Richie _made_ that a meaningless shell, but it didn’t fix the root of the problem, which will forevermore be that he just can’t get Eddie back.

No matter what he does, no matter how many gods or Turtles or Its or _somethings_ he prays to, no matter how many atrocities he commits, Richie will never be able to undo what Patrick Hockstetter did.

He sits back and smokes some more while Bill and Ben finagle Patrick’s remains into the rusted Amana refrigerator. It’s no small task. Ben takes sick glee in hacking off his legs one at a time to make him fit better. Bill smiles too bright as he observes the process. Stan makes an offhand comment about saving the leftovers that has Bev cackling as Mike claps him on the back.

It doesn’t fix anything. Richie’s alone without being alone. Richie’s missing a vital element of his existence.

Maybe that feeling will fade with time.

He doubts it very much.

But then they’re bathing off in the Kenduskeag, pushing and splashing and roping each other into a game of chicken, and it’s funny (or maybe it isn’t funny at all), because a few short hours ago he was _delighted_ by the prospect of making things even, making things _right,_ and he’s stuck here feeling worse than ever because--

Because some part of him thought this would undo things. _An eye for an eye._

What would it have changed, anyway?

They’re _laughing,_ they’re jovial, they’re basking in a 

_(hollow)_

victory, and the light in their eyes says _we did it; we won._ It says: _we did it_ together.

_(but they weren’t together, not really)_

It’s Bev who realizes first, after she’s finished pointing out that behind Bill’s ears are still filthy and he’d do well to learn proper hygiene, especially if he’s going to go around facilitating live human biology experiments in his free time. She turns to Richie with a grin, probably expecting a laugh, and he doesn’t know when he started crying but he _is,_ standing dejected in water up to his waist with blood turning it a murky pink around him.

“Oh, Richie,” she says, the smile fading, as she wades over to him and wraps him in a hug. She doesn’t need to say anything else -- she understands well enough. Richie knows this. Something is missing from him (from all of them, of course), and Bev can see it as well as he can feel it, and she _understands:_ he can’t fix it, no matter how badly he wants to.

Bill comes, too, and Stan, but Mike and Ben linger for a moment. A hushed conversation passes between them. They both carry with them some modicum of uncertainty as they approach the rest of the Losers and put their arms around everyone to join the embrace, if only to make Richie feel better for a small moment.

“I think it’s worth trying,” Mike says, out of the blue, as if _anyone_ else had just spoken, and Richie’s about to tell him he’s losing his marbles when Ben flashes a megawatt smile and says, “Alright, then let’s try.”

He’s tugging Richie by the arm, pulling him along behind him as he splashes up out of the water onto the bank, and subsequently all the rest of the Losers follow, because they’re a unit, a _pack,_ and because they’re all sticking close to Richie in their attempts at comfort. 

“C’mon, get dressed,” Ben is telling him, pushing his backpack into his hands. Robotically, he changes into the clean set of clothes he brought along, and all the while he wonders _what’s next_ and finds his curiosity sniffing around _what are Mike and Ben planning?_

They gather the other Losers close to them, in a tight circle in the grey haze of twilight, and Stan, ever prepared, passes Ben a flashlight when he pulls a library book from his bag. 

_Urban Legends of Maine: An Anthology by Joe Hill,_ the cover reads. Richie’s deadly curiosity grows louder, outweighing his worries for the future, even if only temporarily, because he can’t imagine any way a book of tall tales from across the state is going to make any of this better. 

Ben flips it open to a bookmarked section titled _The Pet Sematary,_ and Richie and Bill exchange a bewildered look over the top of his head. 

“Mike and I found this at the library yesterday,” he explains.

“What the hell were you doing at the library?” Richie asks, and the rest is left unsaid but not unheard: _What the hell were you doing at the library after we spent the day at Eddie’s fucking_ funeral?

At the same moment, Bev asks, “Found it _how?”_ and in her case, as well, a second, hidden meaning still finds them. Things found in Derry are sometimes not found merely by happenstance.

“We just ended up there,” Mike tells them with a shrug, “because that’s where we were supposed to be.” And they all get that; they’ve all been there. Something greater than themselves is often in control here.

“And it was sitting on the table we sat at. We didn’t even notice it at first,” Ben adds. “It was just… _there.”_

“Like it appeared out of thin air.”

“And we knew.”

“Ah-Alright, what’s so important about ih-ih-it?” Bill asks, but he’s already squinting down at the page, gaze tracing over the words in the dim glow of the flashlight.

Here, Mike and Ben pause to share a meaningful look, and it’s Mike who speaks first, after a silent conversation passes between them. “We think it will help us. Help us fix things, I mean.”

At the baffled silence from the rest of the group, Ben sighs, world-weary, and rubs the tip of his finger over the words _Pet Sematary._ “Help us bring Eddie back, if we’re willing to just _try.”_

And Richie Tozier wishes he didn’t believe in the supernatural, or in aliens, or magic, or cosmic Turtles or lucky pennies or shooting stars or the merit of old sayings like _an eye for an eye,_ because if he didn’t believe those things, he wouldn’t feel so suddenly, deliriously hopeful. 

_Try,_ Ben says, but what Richie hears is _salvation._ What he hears is _hope._ What he hears is the sound of Eddie’s laughter, alive and well, bright and soft, and how close he finds himself to bringing that back to them.

“Of course we are,” he says in a strained voice, eyes burning again with the threat of tears, and around him all the Losers nod in agreement. “Of course we’re willing to try.”

_Anything to fix this._

“Then we’ve got to move fast,” Ben tells them all, and sets about explaining the task ahead.

  
“ _The sleepy town of Ludlow, Maine,”_ the anthology reads, _“hides a dark and fascinating secret…”_

* * *


End file.
